Talkin' about an Evolution
Rush hour Tokyo is saturated with neon, noise and the smell of miso soup. At the kerbside, pig-tailed girls in tiny plaid skirts and thigh-high white stockings stop tobe snapped by their boyfriends beside our Nissan GT-R and Mitsubishi Evo X.
Straight-faced businessmen start up inquisitive, broken conversations about the pair, all of them already very aware of these national icons - interested, awed and utterly reverential.
Directly across the wide pavement from where we're parked is a brightly lit shop front. There are signs in the window in Japanese, dotted with the odd English word, but its wares remain a mystery. I weave amidst the camera flashes and stockinged legs to the doorway. It has an almost celestial quality, like one of those cinematic interpretations of crossing Heaven's threshold, as I blink into the light and step inside.
Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, is shelf after shelf densely packed with DVDs. Every single cover displays the flawless features of a Japanese manga girl, with perfect outsized round face and perfect outsized oval eyes. Their tiny mouths are pursed into expressions of blank but coquettish innocence.
And on every cover, this childlike purity is wantonly shattered by a super-sexualised pastiche of the sort of physique you see in porn films. Gigantic, gravity-defying breasts bursting out above minuscule waists, long legs tapering in razor-sharp stilettos.
'Is the Skyline's successor really going to be worth more than double the list price of this Evo?'
Everywhere I look, a nipple is narrowly averted by a judicious strand of jet-black hair, a bare crotch concealed by a tiny, sylph-like hand. And all about me, middle-aged men in suits and thick glasses stand side by side with young guys in the multifarious fashions of Japan's youth, listening to iPods and sifting idly through the shelves before them.
This deeply weird place reveals something, God knows exactly what, but something quite significant about Japanese thinking. All those girls surrounding the cars - sort of cosmopolitan, faux-naive, St Trinian's - are revealing something similar. The GT-R and Evo reveal it too.
They tap into something really primal that, with all our pretensions towards sophistication and understatement, we in Europe have strayed far away from. As if to say, 'This is what we like, and we know it's what we like, because we really know ourselves', Japan is producing things to sate its deepest, purest desires. Whether you approve or not, that's simply a cultural thing.
I have just 24 hours with the GT-R and Evo X, and there's only one thing on my mind as I tail the Nissan through downtown Tokyo. Is the Skyline's successor really going to be worth more than double the list price of this Evo?
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